Reframing the Colonial Past

Luisa Elena Alcalá is Associate Professor in the Department of the History and Theory of Art of the Universidad Autónoma of Madrid. Her research focuses on Latin American colonial art, especially the relationship between visual culture and religious practices, taste, and patronage, with an emphasis on the Jesuits as major players in the circulation of art in the Early Modern period. 

Matthew Restall is the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of History, Anthropology, and Women’s Studies, and Director of Latin American Studies at Penn State University. He has published over twenty books and eighty essays and articles on colonial Mexico, with an emphasis on the Maya region. His latest book on conquest history, When Montezuma Met Cortés, was published by Ecco/HarperCollins in 2018. 

Rosario I.  Granados is the Marilynn Thoma Associate Curator, Art of the Spanish Americas at the Blanton Museum of Art at The University of Texas at Austin. She is a historian of religious material culture and interested in collecting practices. Her exhibition Painted Cloth: Ritual and Fashion in Colonial Latin America will open at the Blanton in August 2022. 

Susan Deans-Smith is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research and teaching interests focuses on the history of colonial Latin America, including the histories of artisans, artists, art markets, and collecting. Her most recent book Museum Matters: Making and Unmaking Mexico’s National Collections (University of Arizona Press, 2021), was co-edited with Miruna Achim and Sandra Rozental.